If a theme displays either an excerpt or the full post depending on the post’s post format, theme developers can add a “Default” blog display option to let the theme keep its default blog display settings. For example, by default a theme might always displays posts with the Quote post format as the full post, so a quote is never truncated, while other post formats like Standard might be always displayed as an excerpt.

Default blog display option in Button

Author Bio

On the single post view, users can opt to display the name and bio of the post’s author. This information comes directly from the author’s profile at Users → Your Profile, and their Gravatar image.

Author bio displayed on single post in Shoreditch

Post Details

The post details section allows users to show or hide the post date, categories, tags, or the post author’s name.

Post details displayed in PenscratchPost details hidden in Penscratch

Featured Images

Users can choose whether to display featured images on single posts and pages. They can also opt whether to display featured images on blog and archive pages, which include category, tag, and date archives as well as search-results pages.

Featured images displayed in Sela

WordPress.com users have loved the flexibility Content Options gives them. We’re very pleased that self-hosted sites can now benefit as well!

I’ve used Vagrant for more than a year now and although it was crashing from time to time, I always managed to get it working again. Not last week. I don’t what happened, but enough was enough – I decided to pull the plug and look for a better alternative.

I thought about switching back to MAMP, as my needs are pretty straightforward. At the same time, I was also on the lookout for something a bit more modern, something that would allow me to use a custom *.test URL like Vagrant and share my local site to the world without a headache. That’s when I found Laravel Valet (or Valet for short).

Valet is a Laravel development environment for Mac minimalists. No Vagrant, No Apache, No Nginx, No `/etc/hosts file`. You can even share your sites publicly using local tunnels.

It’s so easy I wish I’d switched to it a few months ago when it was initially released.

Don’t get me wrong – Vagrant is still great for big development environments. But for my own simple WordPress needs, Valet is the perfect tool which I would highly recommend to fellow WordPress developers.

How to install?

The official documentation and the article written by Tom McFarlin on TutsPlus are both really clear, but I’ll share my own process in case you’d like to try it.

5. Install Valet

From the terminal, enter sudo nano .bash_profile. Once the file is open, add a new line to it:

export PATH="$PATH:$HOME/.composer/vendor/bin"

Save and close the file (ctrl+X, Y then enter). Reload the new file with source .bash_profile in the terminal.

Now we can continue our installation:

composer global require laravel/valet

Once it’s done you will see a success message like so: Writing lock file. Generating autoload files.

Now we need to finalize the installation of Valet:

valet install

After a moment you should get a Valet installed successfully! message.

That’s it. Valet is installed and is running.

6. Using Valet

To start using Valet, you need to “park” it. Go to a folder containing all you sites, e.g. cd /Sites/, and simply type valet park. From now on, all the folders inside this Site folder will get a .test URL. So for example, a folder named MyAwesomeWordPressSite will be accessible from http://myawesomewordpresssite.test.

I downloaded the latest version of WordPress and created a new folder called… WordPress. So when I type wordpress.test in my browser I’m being redirected to my WordPress site. On the first launch, you will have to install WordPress the same way you’d do on a server.

WordPress: The first launch

First of all, we need to start the MySQL server so in your terminal just enter mysql.server start. This step is pretty much the equivalent of vagrant up. You will have to do it every time you want to work. To turn it off just enter mysql.server stop (just like vagrant halt).

Then you will need a MySQL database.

In the terminal, run: (whatever is the name of our database here)

mysql -uroot
CREATE DATABASE whatever;
exit

If you prefer a GUI, I would recommend Sequel Pro to create and manage my databases. It’s free and it has a simple interface.

If you now go to http://wordpress-trunk.test, you will see an error 404 because Valet doesn’t understand it’s a WordPress site. No worries. You just need to link the src folder to Valet (where the actual WordPress site is).

With the release of Jetpack 3.9 last month, we introduced a new tool available for all theme developers: Social Menus. It allows site owners to create a new menu location which is used to display links to Social Media Profiles.

Adding Support

Theme developers can add support for a Social Menu by following these three simple steps.